Mark Lost His Head
John Mark was one of the original seventy disciples (Luke 10:1 ff). Tradition holds that he was one of those who left Christ when he preached on the Bread of Life (John 6:44-6:66). Saint Peter brought him back to the faith.
He traveled with Paul and Barnabas, who thought him unreliable (Acts 15:37-41). Again he left, again he came back (2 Timothy 4:11). Eventually he served as Peter’s secretary in Rome (cf. 1 Peter 5:15).
It was then that he wrote his short Gospel.
Irenæus says: “Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, himself also handed down to us in writing what was preached by Peter” (Against Heresies III.1 and III.10.6).
St. Clement of Alexandria, relying on the authority of “the elder presbyters”, tells us that, when Peter had publicly preached in Rome, many of those who heard him exhorted Mark, as one who had long followed Peter and remembered what he had said, to write it down, and that Mark “composed the Gospel and gave it to those who had asked for it” (Eusebius, Church History VI.14).
After Peter’s martyrdom, Mark preached in Alexandria Egypt, becoming its first bishop. He was martyred about the year 68.
If Saint Mark’s story is one of some serious ups and downs, the story of his corpse is no less so.
In AD 828, pirates under the pay of the Venetian government stole his bones from their resting place in Alexandria. Pursued by the constables, in their haste they left his head behind.
With most of the Evangelist in their possession, they hurried back to Venice. Saint Mark became patron saint of the Venetian Republic. For centuries, Venice’s flag bore the lion of Saint Mark. And when Napoleon’s invaders ended the Republic, it was not “viva la repubblica” that the people shouted, but “viva San Marco!”
Pope Paul VI returned the Saint’s relics to the church in Alexandria in 1968, and for the first time in more than a thousand years, Mark’s body was all together.
One wonders what he thought of that.
Today on Saint Mark’s feast, it will be good for us to take a moment to read a chapter or two of his Gospel.
O God, who raised up Saint Mark, your Evangelist,
and endowed him with the grace to preach the Gospel,
grant, we pray,
that we may so profit from his teaching
as to follow faithfully in the footsteps of Christ.
Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.Amen.